Posts Tagged ‘NASA’

Despite geopolitical conflicts, the United States and the Russian Federation are still working together on space exploration, as this news item indicates.

Work on a joint US-Russia space station orbiting the Moon is to begin in the mid 2020s. The base is intended to serve as a launching point for manned missions to Mars.Deep Space Gateway (NASA)

The station would be serviced by craft such as the Orion space vessel.

The US and Russia on Wednesday [Sept. 27] announced plans to cooperatively build the first lunar space station.

Roscosmos and NASA, Russia and America’s space agencies, said they had signed a cooperation agreement at an astronautical congress in Adelaide.

The agreement brings Russia onboard to the Deep Space Gateway project announced by NASA earlier this year, which aims to send humans to Mars via a lunar station.

The proposed station would serve as a base for lunar exploration for humans and robots, and as a stopover for spacecraft.

While the Deep Space Gateway is still in concept formulation, NASA is pleased to see growing international interest in moving into cislunar space (between Earth and the Moon) as the next step for advancing human space exploration,” said Robert Lightfoot, acting administrator at NASA headquarters in Washington. [snip]

Roscosmos and NASA have already agreed on standards for a docking unit of the future station,” the Russian space agency said.

“Taking into account the country’s extensive experience in developing docking units, the station’s future elements  as well as standards for life-support systems  will be created using Russian designs.”

About one third of Earth’s largest groundwater basins are being rapidly depleted by human consumption, despite having little accurate data about how much water remains in them, according to two new studies led by the University of California, Irvine (UCI), using data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.

This means that significant segments of Earth’s population are consuming groundwater quickly without knowing when it might run out, the researchers conclude. The findings are published … in Water Resources Research.

“Available physical and chemical measurements are simply insufficient,” said UCI professor and principal investigator Jay Famiglietti, who is also the senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Given how quickly we are consuming the world’s groundwater reserves, we need a coordinated global effort to determine how much is left.”

The studies are the first to comprehensively characterize global groundwater losses with data from space, using readings generated by NASA’s twin GRACE satellites. GRACE measures dips and bumps in Earth’s gravity, which are affected by the mass of water. In the first paper, researchers found that 13 of the planet’s 37 largest aquifers studied between 2003 and 2013 were being depleted while receiving little to no recharge.

I could do without the corny musical score and sound effects, but I do agree with the video makers that the Earth, with its ecology of topsoil, waters, atmosphere and web of living organisms, is more like a living thing itself than it is like anything else.

The Gaia hypothesis is a metaphor, not a fact, but it is a good metaphor. The Earth is more like a living thing than it is like an economic system subject to cost-benefit analysis, or a cybernetic feedback system that can be reprogrammed, or any of the other metaphors that blind us to our world’s inter-connectedness.

The video shows three years of time lapse photos of the Sun, taken at the rate of two a day by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, at a time in the solar flare cycle when flare activity is at its height.

In this video, the Sun looks like it is alive. But the apparent pulsation is due to variations in the position of the SDO as it orbits the Earth while the Earth orbits the Sun. Each of the flickers is a solar flare discharging orders of magnitude more energy than all the atomic bomb explosions in history.

About a minute into this video, you see a little image of the earth drawn to scale, which is dwarfed by the immensity of the solar flare. It shows the vastness, the beauty and the wonder of the universe. But I won’t say the power and size of the solar flare makes me feel insignificant as a human being, because we on our little blue marble of a planet have consciousness and intelligence, which the solar flare does not. As the 17th century Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote—

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor then, to think well; this is the principle of morality

Night before last NASA’s Curiosity rover made a successful landing on Mars. It was a great achievement, one that makes me feel proud to be an American, and proud to be a human being. Here’s USA Today’s account of what was involved in making the landing a success.

Curiosity, a roving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target late Sunday after an eight-month, 352-million-mile journey. It parked its six wheels about four miles from its ultimate science destination — Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of Gale Crater near the equator.

Extraordinary efforts were needed for the landing because the rover weighs one ton, and the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow down a spacecraft. Curiosity had to go from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake. In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered it to the ground at 2 mph.

I can’t help but reflect that everybody involved did their jobs without the need for bonuses or other financial incentives. I wish that all American institutions reflected this level of dedication and competence.

Knowledge of the past is an antidote for discouragement with the present. When I stop and reflect, I realize that, on a day-to-day basis, the world was as threatening a place during the periods of history we consider great as they are now.

We remember Periclean Athens not for imperialism and slavery, but for Sophocles and Socrates. We remember Elizabethan England not for its cruel executions and religious persecutions, but for Shakespeare.

What about our own society will be remembered when Goldman Sachs and the “war on terror” are forgotten?